Why would you output XML

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The Wikitax aims at being as simple as possible to write. But if you want to reuse text of or for the Wikipedia you need to write a filter for each format. As far as I know the Wiki system only provides a conversion from Wikitax to HTML.

If there is an XML syntax for Wikitax and a convertion between both of them then:

  • You "only" need to write an XSLT filter to import/export other formats.
  • A PDF view of articles (with FO)
  • Editing articles in OpenOffice
  • A Wikipedia Client using OpenOffice as GUI? (Wikitax may be simple but people prefer WYSIWYG!)
  • How about a wysiwyg editor that doesn't take over a minute to load? ;)

Note: See http://wiki.auf-trag.de/ for an experimental python script that converts wiki articles to LaTeX or PDF-- Stw

Other side effects/benefits include

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  • You could use another wiki syntax to write articles for wikipedia. Some people might like to write *foo* or <b>foo</b> or '''foo''' but it's all the same, isn't it?

Portability

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There will probably never be one XML format for all wikis. For the Wikipedia project we should define a format that is convertable to Wikitax and vice versa. every other converting tasks may work on top of this.

Other Wikis with XML formats

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See also

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